Marketo’s Marketing Nation became an event-within-an-event at Adobe Summit on Thursday, where senior vice-president Steve Lucas referenced everything from The Matix to Coachcella and Fyre Festival to explain how B2B marketers can focus on creating stronger experiences for their customers.
Following its acquisition by Adobe last year, Marketo’s key product, engage, was enhanced with several integrations with features from Adobe Marketing Cloud and its artificial intelligence engine, Sensei. Using Automated Personalization in Adobe Target, for example, marketers will be abel to crop photos for web sites and manage other creative tasks directly within Marketo Engage. Account Profiling, meanwhile, is designed to let sales and marketing team run fit data and intent data through Sensei to develop their ideal customer profile and compile more relevant target lists for account-based marketing initiatives.
Lucas likened the combination of Adobe and Marketo to the “little red pill” in The Matrix, where marketers will be abel to find out “how deep the rabbit hole goes” which in this case means how far they need to go to reach their customers. He contrasted this with what he described as the ineffectiveness of customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
“I’m not saying sales people are terrible data entry people but . . . they’re the worst,” Lucas said. “Your strategy winds up being based on what somebody heard. It’s like playing the gossip game. It’s weird. That’s how we rely on CRM today. It is a fallible system.”
Instead, Lucas urged the Marketing Nation audience to make every customer experience “epic” by using data to learn about customers in the moment. He cited the Coachella music festival and the work its organizers consistently put to curate great acts, versus the infamous Fyre Festival.
“Fyre (was) a pile of hot garbage,” he said. “It was nothing more than someone believing a few tweets and some images with a good idea is the same thing as a great experience.”
For B2B marketers, an epic experience should make buyers want to come back time and time again, Lucas said. It means being able to assess a change in sentiment on a second-by-second basis and being able to digitally respond. The addition of Adobe’s Advertising Cloud, analytics, content and commerce tools will allow Marketo to deliver on a vision the company has been outlining at Marketing Nation for years, he added.
“People talk about moonshot thinking — they forget that getting to the moon takes a lot of fuel,” he said. “With Adobe, we have the fuel.”
Since joining Adobe, Marketo is also building upon its existing relationship with Drift, and announced what it called “Conversational ABM” using chatbots in addition to content. Web site visitors can be targeted with the chatbot to instantly schedule meetings with a sales rep or create a more personalized experience, according to Drift CEO David Cancel, who joined Lucas briefly on stage.
“We spend all of our time trying to reach that VIP. When that VIP comes to the web site, though, we treat them like a stranger,” he said, adding that Conversational ABM will let B2B marketers “deliver a personalzied VIP experience at scale.”
Among those eager to make use of the new Marketo features is its new owner. In an onstage conversation during Marketing Nation, Adobe CMO Anne Lewnes said Marketo is an example of the kind of firm whose tools her department often brings forward to the senior leadership for consideration.
“When I told my B2B team about the Marketo acquisition, they were like, ‘Oh my God — when is the implementation?’” she add, adding the internal deployment may be compete by this quarter. “Give me those leads!”
Marketing Nation, along with Adobe Summit 2019, wrapped up Thursday.
Shane Schick
